Video: Detail

Now let's talk about details. In a scene like this you can see that we have a, a pretty nice photo to begin with. We have this beautiful green door, we have the orange pumpkin on here, these red posts in the front of it, and the whole thing looks quite nice. But if we just photograph the whole scene. It's going to be okay, but it's not going to be a great photograph. What I want to do is actually focus on individual details. Now we're going to do this two different ways. First, I want to get a shot of a particular detail up nice and close. And that's going to be this brass doorknob right here. And then I'm going to photograph the red post in front up close, but we're going to make sure we include the green door in the background, so you can see the rest of the story. So lets start with the brass handle here.

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Detail

Now let's talk about details. In a scene like this you can see that we have a, a pretty nice photo to begin with. We have this beautiful green door, we have the orange pumpkin on here, these red posts in the front of it, and the whole thing looks quite nice. But if we just photograph the whole scene. It's going to be okay, but it's not going to be a great photograph. What I want to do is actually focus on individual details. Now we're going to do this two different ways. First, I want to get a shot of a particular detail up nice and close. And that's going to be this brass doorknob right here. And then I'm going to photograph the red post in front up close, but we're going to make sure we include the green door in the background, so you can see the rest of the story. So lets start with the brass handle here.

By getting up nice and close like this, and filling the frame with it. I can really tell the story of the door knob, and we can see this door knob in all of detail. The detail of the paint around it and so on, and it really makes for quite a nice photograph. Now let's get back over here to this red post. I'm going to get down nice and low, and fill the frame with the red post, but I want to be sure that I include the green door in the background. So now as you can see, we have this really nice photograph of the red post, but we're also showing the door in the background, so we see the whole story here.

So once again we have this beautiful scene but by focusing on a particular detail we're doing a better job of telling the story. Now let's take a look at another example, where we're going to find what appears to be nothing of interest at all. But by finding a really nice detail in there, we'll actually be able to make a nice photo. Sometimes in an environment like this, it's not immediately obvious that there's anything really interesting to photograph. So again by looking for those details, we can find something that might actually make a nice photo. So for example, at first glance this is not really that attractive, there's not much here to shot.

But if we look closely and look for a subtle detail, we might find something worth photographing. So for example, these little flowers here are actually quite pretty. So if I get really nice and close to em, and make sure that the background is well out of focus. What I can end up with is actually a pretty nice photo. These little flowers here, have lots of beautiful detail to em, and by getting close to them and photographing them, with nice depth of field, shallow depth of field, so the background goes out of focus. We end up with something really quite nice. Now let's take a look at one more example, where we're going to put everything together into one final shot. There's one more little detail that I want to focus on here in this garden. As you can see, these rocks down here have some nice texture, and even some nice colors to them.

So, let's get a nice, close-up, detailed photograph of these rocks. I'll start by getting in nice and close, filling the frame, and what we end up with is well, it's a pretty decent photograph of this rock in here. We can definitely see the color and the texture in here, but the overall photo isn't all that interesting. So now what I want to do is put together everything that we've learned here about perspective, angle and detail, and just by shifting my position a little bit, we can make a much more interesting photograph. I also want to take advantage of this horizontal line on the rock and introduce that as a graphical element in the photograph.

So I'm going to change my position, change my perspective here and get a bit of a different angle, and photograph that again. (audio playing) So as we can see here, we now have a much more interesting photograph. The horizontal line of the rock has added a really nice graphical element to the photo. So keep all these things in mind when you're out shooting. Perspective, angle and detail, three very important ideas that if you keep in your head while your out shooting will dramatically improve your photography.

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